Populism in Venezuela

Ryan Brading

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136227790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Populism in Venezuela analyses the emergence, formation, reproduction and resistance to a left-wing populist project in a major world oil producer.

For readers who seek to understand the historical, economical and sociological contexts that gave rise to a 38 year-old mestizo-mulato Lieutenant Colonel who stormed the presidential palace in a bloody coup d'état in 1992, subsequently returned to the same palace in 1998, but this time, as a democratically elected President, and has been in power since, this book is the right place to start. In spite of opposition attempts to oust President Hugo Chávez and his political machinery from power, this 'socialism of the twenty-first century' hegemonic project has succeeded in creating an institutional structure designed to improve the lives of the previously excluded population. An in-depth fieldwork study of a Cuban healthcare programme named Barrio Adentro (deep in the slums) in Venezuela's poor and rural areas, and the nonviolence Manos Blancas (white hands) opposition student movement - provides a descriptive and analytical account of people's problems from both sides in a deeply polarised society. The concluding chapter of this book examines Chávez's intention to stay in power until 2031.

An original resource for scholars, students and general readers; this book not only furthers our understanding populism in Venezuela but also provides a sound method to analyse populist practices in other contexts.

1 Populism, Theories, and Logics

A Theoretical and Methodological Approach

This chapter starts with a section addressing general characteristics of the literature on populism. Margaret Canovan’s theoretical approach to populism and other authors are addressed here. The following sub-section evaluates three theoretical populist approaches that could potentially provide an analytical structure for this in-depth investigation. First, Paul Taggart’s ‘heartland & chameleon’ theoretical approach to populism is evaluated, followed by Francisco Panizza’s theoretical propositions and Ernesto Laclau’s theoretical characteristics of populism. The second section discusses Laclau’s theoretical approach combined with Jason Glynos and David Howarth’s ‘logics approach’ methodological schema. This chapter seeks to achieve two important objectives. First, it addresses different theoretical approaches to populism in the literature and determines which theories to use in order to identify instances of populist politics and categorize the key elements of such politics. Second, it selects a methodological model in which key elements from a case study can be categorized and offers a new approach to understanding the dynamics of populist political practices in a deeply polarized society.

1.1 THE CONCEPT OF POPULISM

For many years, the study of populism has been held back by the complex problem of framing a clear methodological schema. Some analysts have offered definitions or listed essential characteristics of populism, and others have found only dubious connections and weak similarities between different populist practices. Attempts to offer a general characterization of populism have been contentious.¹ According to Margaret Canovan, the definitions formed ‘suggest affinities with ideological movements like socialism, liberalism or nationalism. But although all these other “isms”range over widely varied phenomena, each gains a degree of coherence to identify themselves by the name, distinctive principles and policies’. However, ‘populism does not fit this pattern’.²

The abstract nature of populism is clearly fleshed out in Canovan’s seven analytical sub-categories, published in 1981, which are: (1) farmers’ radicalism, (2) peasant movements, (3) intellectual agrarian socialism, (4) populist dictatorship, (5) populist democracy, (6) reactionary populism, and (7) politician’s populism. The first three fall into the ‘agrarian populisms’ category, and the remaining four fall into the ‘political populisms’ category.³ Canovan refers in brackets to a case in each sub-category. She emphasizes that this classification is a typology of populisms; thus the ‘types suggested are analytical constructs—real-life examples may well overlap several categories’.⁴ This classification was an attempt to simplify the nature of populist practice; nonetheless, choosing one sub-category while recognizing the possibility that cases might overlap does not provide much clarity to an investigation on a case study that appears to be populist. Furthermore, there is only a descriptive narrative, but no methodological structure to analyze what is behind these operations, explaining how and in what context these different types of populism are constructed and crystallized.

Canovan has worked extensively trying to unpack what makes this concept work. She notes that while the interpretations of others overlap and resemble one another across the broad phenomenon, they seem ‘to have little in common apart from its rhetoric element of appeals to “the people’”.⁵ Canovan points out that ‘recent studies have underlined the importance of that populist discourse and shown that paying more attention to it can help both in understanding particular cases and in analyzing populist phenomena more generally’.⁶ Once ‘discourses of “the people’”have been analyzed, ‘the next step is to investigate the range of meanings made available to populists by “the people’s”ambiguities’.⁷

Canovan uses the phrase ‘new populism’ to describe what is in the news today. These new populist movements ‘claim to speak for the forgotten mass of ordinary people’. New populists ‘campaign for and the values they express depend on local concerns and the kind of political establishment they are challenging’. These new populists ‘claim to say aloud what people think especially if it has been deemed by the elite to be unmentionable’. Confrontational in style, populists emphasize their ‘closeness to the grassroots and their distance from the political establishment by using colorful and undiplomatic language’. Populists believe that they ‘represent the rightful source of legitimate power to the people’.⁸ Describing a phenomenon that appears to be populist is interesting; however, the prerogative is to find a methodology that classifies the social, political, and emotional elements that construct and articulate populist practices.

Canovan argues that to understand populism in modern democracy we need to be aware that ‘democratic politics does not and cannot make sense to most of the people it aims to empower’.⁹ Politics is mostly inclusive and democracy needs ‘ideological’ transparency. The politics communicated to the people is systematically misleading. ‘This contradiction between ideology and practice is a standing invitation to populists to raise the cry of democracy betrayed, and to mobilize the discontented behind the banner of restoring politics to the people’.¹⁰ Canovan’s interpretation of populism and modern democracy appears logical; nonetheless, how a populist political force demanding the restoration of a ‘true democracy’ (articulating popular participation) is constructed needs explaining.

According to Torcuato Di Telia, ‘populist’ also applies to conservative politicians who appeal to popular feelings and prejudices. ‘Unimpeachable establishment leaders’ like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher have been labeled populist. ‘Though one should not quarrel about names, this exceedingly wide usage is not fruitful, because it can end by applying to almost any politician capable of winning an election’.¹¹ Di Telia states that the ‘bad shape of the economy in Latin America can breed discontent and possibly populism. Admittedly, discontent can help to build a solid Left’. In Europe, new political projects that are ‘often branded populist, should be put in a different category, because they are not aimed against the dominant groups but rather against the underprivileged ones they see as threatening’.¹²

In America, Michael Kazin claims that with populism Americans have been able to protest social and economic inequalities without calling the entire system into question’. Americans believe ‘that mass democracy can topple any haughty foe means avoiding gloomy thoughts about entrenched structures of capital and the state that often frustrate the most determined movement. Populism is thus a grand form of rhetorical optimism; once mobilized, there is nothing ordinary Americans cannot accomplish’.¹³ According to Kazin’s definition, populism is ‘more an impulse than ideology … too elastic and promiscuous … people [populists during American politics in the twentieth century] employed populism as a flexible mode of persuasion. They used traditional kinds of expressions, tropes, themes, and images to convince large numbers of Americans to join their side or to endorse their views on particular issues’.¹⁴ In my view, dichotomy in America’s society is not polarized enough for social and political unrest to emerge and challenge the institutional structure as a whole. Populist demands succeed in changing conditions via democratic processes without de-instituting the establishment. In other words, these kinds of political practices are better classified as moderate populism.

I have discussed some interpretations of populism, highlighting the ambiguity of this political phenomenon. Nonetheless, I cannot find a methodological approach with a theoretical structure that explains the explanandum posed in the introduction of this investigation. Canovan uses the phrase new populism to describe what is in the news today. In my view, this is only a naming exercise without sufficient methodological grounds to explain the shift from ‘Traditional to New Populism’ (e.g. democratic appeal to the people only scratches the surface), and Canovan claims that we should acknowledge that ‘recent stress on populist rhetoric raises an issue that goes beyond matters of definition’.¹⁵

The theories I discuss below could provide the framework to analyze this in-depth case study. First, Taggart’s theoretical proposition is addressed, followed by a discussion of Francisco Panizza’s theoretical interpretation of populism. This section concludes with Ernesto Laclau’s theoretical understanding of populist practices. I aim to select methods that could help me unpack what populism entails and comprehend the necessary conditions for populist practices to emerge, who invests in a populist project, why and how they do so, and how this project crystallizes itself. I’ll explain at the end of each sub-section the value of each theoretical approach.

1.1.1 Taggart’s Theoretical Approach: ‘Heartland & Chameleon’

Paul Taggart describes ‘populism as an unusual concept’ with an ‘essential impalpability and awkward conceptual slipperiness’. Taggart claims that populism appears to be ‘revolutionary … offering the potential to radically transform politics’.¹⁶ Taggart stresses that ‘populism is a difficult, slippery concept’. It ‘lacks features that would make it more tangible’. Thus, ‘it is profoundly difficult to construct a generalised description, let alone a universal and comprehensive definition of populism as an idea or as a political movement’.¹⁷ Taggart tries to define this phenomenon ‘by exploring six key themes that run through populism’:

• Populists as hostile to representative politics
• Populists identifying themselves with an idealized heartland within the community they favor
• Populism as an ideology lacking core values
• Populism as a powerful reaction to a sense of extreme crisis
• Populism as containing fundamental dilemmas that make it self-limiting
• Populism as a chameleon, adopting the colors of its environment

These six themes can interlink with each other in different ways. Based upon the context of the researched case, these themes can cast light on the particularities of a populist involvement.¹⁸

Taggart points out that a populist practice ‘excludes elements it sees as alien, corrupt or debased, and works on a distinction between the things which are wholesome and those which are not’.¹⁹ In this context, Taggart describes ‘heartland’ (mentioned in the second theme above) and the margins. ‘It is a notion that is constructed by looking inward and backward’. ‘Heartland’ creates ‘a world that embodies the collective ways and wisdom of the people who construct it, usually with reference to what has gone before (even if that is idealized)’. The heartland ‘is populated by “the people”and gives meaning to constructions and invocations of the people by populists’.²⁰ Taggart claims that populism has an essentially ‘chameleonic’ quality—taking ‘on the hue of the environment in which it occurs’.²¹ This is not a disguise or camouflage, but an ability to adapt to the circumstances it encounters. ‘Populism has primary and secondary features, and one of its primary features is that it takes on, as a matter of course, secondary features from its context’. Ideologies tend to do this, whereas ‘populism constructs narratives, myths and symbols’, with the need to ‘resonate with the heartland draw[ing] on the surroundings to a fundamental degree’.²²

Taggart notes that populism ‘lacks universal key values, it is chameleonic, taking on attributes of its environment, and, in practice, is episodic. Populism is an episodic, anti-political, empty-hearted, chameleonic celebration of the heartland in the face of crisis’.²³ Furthermore, Taggart states that ‘populism serves many masters and mistresses … it has been a force for change, against change, a creature of progressive politics of the left … a companion of the extreme right’.²⁴ The reason for its adaptability lies in the ‘empty-heart’ of populism, lacking a commitment to key values. ‘While other ideologies contain, either implicitly or explicitly, a focus on one or more values such as equality, liberty and justice, populism has no such core to it’. This explains why a wide range of political practices can be defined as populist.²⁵ Taggart argues that in the politics of the ‘heartland’, ‘populist rhetoric uses the language of the people not because this expresses democratic convictions about the sovereignty of the masses, but because “the people”are the occupants of the heartland and this is what populists are trying to evoke’.²⁶ In other words, populist rhetoric, in the name of the occupants of the heartland, discursively emphasizes in a political dimension what they (people) perceive of their heartland.

Heartland can be categorized as a territory of the imagination. In spit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Latin American Politics
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Diagrams
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Populism, Theories, and Logics: A Theoretical and Methodological Approach
• 2 The Venezuelan State: Its Formation, Consolidation, and Decline
• 3 The Process of Deinstitutionalizing the Power Structure and Institutionalizing Venezuela's Bolivarian Project
• 4 A Healthcare Program in Excluded Areas: A Community Participative Model Constructs Healthcare with Cuban Medics in Venezuela
• 5 The Anti-Bolivarian Student Movement: New Social Actors Challenge the Advancement of Venezuela's Bolivarian Radicalism
• 6 Indefinite Re-Election, Gerrymandering, Chávez's Cancer, Grand Missions, and a United Opposition Force
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index